Science magazine has updated their list of Twitter Science Stars to add a few of the people they missed before — so now I’m #18, rather than #10. I am crushed.
No, wait, no I’m not, and I think Science totally missed the major point of the criticism — it’s not that we need a better, more thorough hierarchical ranking, or that somehow their methodology was not objective enough, but that one-dimensional lists built around trivially measured metrics do not adequately or intelligently describe multi-dimensional social phenomena. Am I really one worse than economist Jeffrey Sachs (#17), and one better than astronaut Alexander Gerst (#19, what a loser)? What do we learn from this list?
What we learn is something more general, that somehow, the psychology of the Western mind is often acutely attracted to the simplicity of numbered, linear lists — all you have to do, though, is look at clickbait sites to figure that out, and we don’t expect Science to follow the trend…while completely failing to notice the phenomenon.
Perhaps instead of writing a thoughtful paper on this psychology topic, we need
— Top Ten Clickbait Techniques! —
That makes you less of a twit.
What’s a Western mind?
Are clickbait listicles uncommon outside of the English-speaking bits of the web? That’d be an incentive to learn a new language, right there…
anym #3
I’ve seen them here and there on Scandinavian news sites and magazines, but I’m pretty sure we’re Western despite our lack of English as our first languages. ^_~
In regards to the story: I personally prefer an article that exposes me to various things or people I might not have known about rather than just ranking them, but I do think something akin to the clickbait articles have been around for a while. Seen plenty of quite old newspapers and posters listing reasons for what they were advocating, including at least one poster titled “Fourteen Reasons for Supporting Women’s Suffrage”, so it’s not entirely out of the blue that it became popular to advertise with quick easy-to-skim lists of stuff. That may just be a sign of that attraction to numbered linear lists, though. That one poster for suffragism clearly shows that it works, though, so you better start listing everything in favour of feminism, scepticism, and science, PZ! :P
They also seemed committed to not really dealing with how their “methods,” even for the expanded list, kept the list very white and very male. Which makes you wonder the extent to which they understood the criticisms…
Where’s Ken Ham’s picture? I looked and looked but couldn’t find it.
They must have made a mistake…
Get over it! It’s f’in Twitter. It’s kinda’ like saying I’m popular because I’ve got more dog poop in my yard than you do!
The real pisser is you didn’t wind up ahead of those two windbags in 5th and 11th.
The sleeper is that Chicago Cat in 67th. Cat is comin’ on!
so that is way ‘all the atheists are leaving you’ comment came from McFucknut’s rant? Your twitter ranking dropped per Science so you are no longer a popular in atheist circles?